Across-channel intensity discrimination in the presence of an interferer

Listeners' thresholds for discriminating changes in the relative intensities of two octave-spaced pure tones were measured in three conditions using a 2AFC procedure. In the baseline condition the tone pair was presented alone, while in the two interference conditions the tone pair was accompanied by four additional tones, with the frequency separation between adjacent components of the resultant six-component complex being one octave. In the interference conditions the flanking components were either gated synchronously with the target pair, or began 200 ms ahead. The level of the flanking components relative to the target was randomized on each presentation. The overall stimulus level was also randomized on each presentation to reduce the effectiveness of within-channel comparisons. Threshold elevations in the synchronous condition relative to the baseline ranged from approximately 5 to 17 decibels. By contrast, in the asynchronous condition only one listener showed significant (although substantially reduced) interference. The results complement previous observations that across-channel intensity comparisons are poorer between components that begin or end at different times, and are qualitatively consistent with the hypothesis that temporal misalignment promotes the perceptual segregation of simultaneous frequency components.